My Mother's Lover and Other Stories

by Sumana Roy

  I’ve been in love. It is possible that I still love him. (Someone is bashing ice cubes with something heavy – what did people drink before the invention of ice?)

  The four mirrors reflect light multiple times. What is their use? I love light, but I do not like to see its source – lamps, bulbs, nothing, with the possible exception of stars. I don’t spend any time looking at stars though I notice them now, sometimes, on Instagram – they’ve remained unchanged since I first saw them. Everything is changing – changing too fast.

  I notice a woman’s nipples as if they were stars. I’m certain that no one except me has noticed them. She’s not wearing a bra. I wonder whether I am a man. I take out a notebook and begin doodling. I find that I’ve drawn stars on a blank page. And though I never intended it, every star has a thought bubble. I check to see if I’m wearing a bra. All these stars look like nipples to me.

  Two girls – when did they come? – are quarrelling. They’re throwing out their arms as if they were swimmers.

  Oh, they’ve made up, I think. They’re smoking cigarettes together – sharing a fire, and now the smoke.

  Aged men and women are passing by. (I won’t live as long as them.) I say aged because the joy on their faces is anachronistic, one of looking at the world at eye level, not with their heads bent down. They look like the aged cast of The Sound of Music, if there were to be a sequel. They might be rejected by the casting director – their agedness is not photogenic, not the circles of wrinkles and folds of wasted skin on faces in photography magazines but one where age hasn’t accumulated, just slapped them, as if it were an accident, a case of mistaken identity. Are they going to church? Plaid skirts, white shorts and tops, hats that now belong only to films.

  How beautiful they are. They don’t want to die.

  I check for the pills again. Yes, they’re there, all ten of them – enough, enough to kill. We know less about life than we do about death. We don’t know what might create life, but we do know what will end it. These sleeping pills.

  I feel powerful.

  It is Saturday morning. Men are running. Five days for walking, one for resting. And this, the one in between, Saturday, is for running. They run without looking at anyone, as if the gaze would cause them injury. Their seriousness is scary. They are devout, their own worshippers. I doodle lines in my notebook: The body is a temple: Walk is Worship. Later, I scratch them out.

  Are our minds altered by running? Do they ever feel like dying while they are running? Do they ever feel like they’re dying because they are running?

  ‘Orange juice?’ the waitress asks me, familiar with my order by now.

  I smile. Everywhere I notice moles and freckles on the arms and chests of women, sometimes more freckles than on mosaic floors in India. I feel the urge to touch the waitress’s freckles, as if her skin was bubble wrapping that I want to puncture with my fingers.

  Am I a woman? I wonder.

  A tram goes past. I stare at the passengers as they stare at me – a brown woman at the window. We’ll forget each other the next moment, like we do the things on our newsfeed as we scroll through them, or people who die, like I will soon. And yet we look – we love looking out of the window. What is it that we like to see?

  A double-decker sightseeing bus. Like a child on a father’s shoulders. Everything – every machine invented by scientists – is a version, perhaps an advanced and more efficient version, of the human body or human action, or adapted from the natural world. The woman with blonde hair on the last seat of the open deck – why is she leaning out of the bus? Is she suicidal too?

  I order an omelette with champignons and spinach on the side. I could cook this at home in a few minutes, but I’ve come here. One can’t die at home unless one is ill and dies a natural death. Why spoil someone’s house by dying in it? I smile to myself thinking how living will not spoil it, but a body, severed from life, will be handed down generations as an unpleasant memory, an inheritance of fear. I have a good landlady. I won’t do this to her.

  Why is the food taking so long? It is as if the slow music is cooking the egg. Everywhere there is music, everywhere there’s the same music, music that no one remembers or listens to, that is made to be forgotten, like a co-passenger on the metro. Why are we living like this, without the backrest of memory and memories?

  The food is here. She puts the plate in front of me and asks gently, ‘So you see all places in Munich?’

  I’m nervous about answering her question. She might as well have been asking me whether I’ve tried everything on the menu. In my head, it’s a kind of end-of-life question. Does she know that I won’t come back again for another meal? ‘Not yet,’ I say, wondering what the German word for ‘yet’ might be.

  ‘Don’t miss walking through the English Gardens,’ she says kindly, pushing the basket of bread towards me.

  We live like tourists – we have the anxiety of tourists, we’re alert to not miss anything that we’ve been asked not to miss. We take photos – our cameras remember more than us. We’ve outsourced remembering to other centres – usually a memory card. Social media is also our memory card. We post the same things twice – we’ve forgotten that we’ve shared it before.

  I wonder how the news of my death would be shared on Facebook. How would anyone know I died here?

  A dog is walking with an old woman as if it were an old woman. (Dogs are trained to behave like humans. Machines are made to behave like humans. I don’t understand why. There are already too many humans on this planet.)

  There will be one less tomorrow, I console myself, or perhaps I’m consoling the planet. It really does not matter anymore. I try to think of myself as a child. Did I want to die even when I was a child? No child wants to die. I’m certain about that.

  As if on cue, a little boy in a black and white striped long-sleeved tee enters the café. He is smiling. It is the smile of someone who’s been smiling ever since he was born, who has learnt only how to smile. No, children don’t want to die. I shake my head in guilt. The mother is pregnant. The little boy probably understands that, or perhaps he doesn’t. He smiles, in knowledge and in ignorance.

  We don’t remember our adult lives as well as our parents and their parents once remembered them. Perhaps because we still remember our childhood (our phones had still not become our memory-keepers), we ascribe all our pain to it. Our adult life is a colony of hurt. Because hurt – and the anxiety to not get hurt again – is the strongest feeling in our being. We make wrong decisions. Moments of joy – even of happiness – do not enable our decisions anymore. ‘I was so happy with him. I want to spend my life with him because I want to be happy like I was always…’ Never like this but ‘He hurt me that day, I don’t want him to hurt me ever again…’ is how we make our decisions. I know this, and yet…

  I was hurt. I will be beyond the reach of hurt soon. I have my tablets. Ten of them. They’ll be enough – I’ve checked on the Internet.

  I can predict all the things that will be written in history books about us – The Age of Hurt, The Age of Victimhood, The Age of… I don’t care. I won’t be there to read them. I don’t have to edit them either! What a beautiful gift from death this is – that one doesn’t have to hear oneself being criticised.

  Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier, Funf, Sechs… The mother is teaching her little boy to count.

  We rely too much on numbers. The number of likes and shares. Our democracies run to the dictatorship of numbers. We think numbers will bring us equality. Is it possible to teach that, when she teaches him how to count?

  When we die, they measure our life in numbers too. She was thirty-three years old, they’ll say.

  I’m back again. I’m still not dead. I’m trying. I’ll get there. The sleeping pills are all there, waiting.

  I’m not embarrassed. The waitress wouldn’t know that I’d thought that that was my last meal. Or did she? A ten Euro tip – she might have guessed?

  I order a gazpacho.

  Most cars
are black here. Or navy. I wonder why. Why do I ask myself such inconsequential questions?

  An ambulance, there. The colour of an ambulance is white. The colour of a wedding dress – just behind it, in a shop window – is white.

  One. Two. Three. 4. 5. 6.

  Six people at the traffic crossing. I see them from behind. Six butts in fitting pants. (Should it be twelve butts? Is ‘butts’ plural, used for a pair?) If it was a woman in a sari, I might have imagined a face. Is it that the fluidity of the sari abets the imagination?

  Someone orders calamari. I hear the sound. All around me is the sea – not water, but its residents, on plates and pans, losing their water. I’ve never been inside the sea. Do people inside it also feel the urge to die, to commit suicide? Like humans, creatures of land, do?

  There are too many women in publishing. I remember a male author tell my male colleague in a whisper. I felt like a cliché – unwanted, like a female foetus in a North Indian village. There’s a ready-made response to that observation: the male writers on university syllabus, and in book catalogues. But you don’t throw hot water on a fly. No, no, it is not for this that I want to die.

  Why do I really want to die? Will death be worth its imagined promise?

  I want to be assured that the sleeping pills are still with me. I dip my hand into my tote – a pencil comes out. Its sharp nose scratches the dry skin of my right hand.

  I think of the person who invented pencils. Did he invent the sharpener too? Life and death. Root and shoot. Action and reaction. Life’s rule is in pairs. If I die today, will someone else die with me? Or will someone be born in my place?

  Someone behind me is reading the cocktail menu: Munich Mule, Baby Blue, Batildsa Brasil. Alliterative pairs. There’s no escape from life’s room-for-two rules. No, it’s not over. Another one – Harry’s Girlfriend.

  Are life and death really a pair?

  Links. Rechts. Links. Rechts. I know this pair. Left. Right. Left. Right. It’s the little boy with his mother.

  Is it possible that someone could spend one’s life walking only in one direction all their life? If I walked out of home and took only the left – only the left – would I ever reach home? (The question takes my mind to my neighbour’s doormat. HOME printed on the coir mat. Home – left outside the house door.)

  Did he ever love me? Where is he now? Does he ever think of me? Will he be sad to hear of my death? Am I dying for myself or for him? Why am I always so confused? Why do I never know?

  I notice after some time that the fingers on my right hand are moving as if I was touching his wet hair. How they’d slip out of my fingers the moment he moved. There’s a mole on my left hand. I touch it. He used to touch it.

  He expected me to be as perfect as a restaurant, where there’s no sign of burnt food.

  The café’s beginning to fill up. Women in groups of three and four, hair displaced from a magazine on to their heads. I touch mine – is it greasy? How does it matter? Life has many fashion rules, I’m quite sure death has none. Many before me have died with greasy hair plastered to their scalps – I’m eligible to die, I remind myself.

  ‘Is it good?’ the waiter asks.

  ‘Ya,’ I say, quickly stressing it with ‘Yes.’

  He stands there, trying to make conversation. ‘Tina go to Venice,’ he says.

  ‘Tina?’ I ask.

  ‘That woman,’ he says, and moving his hands to his ears, indicates the length of her hair.

  I smile and nod my head in understanding.

  ‘Venice.’

  I smile again.

  ‘Her last wish. She ask from God. God give her. So now she go to Venice. Shoo shoo shoo…’ He makes that sound to the accompaniment of his hands – I can’t make out whether it is her flight he indicates or the movement of gondolas on water.

  Death in Venice. The phrase scalds my mind. She – no, she has a name: Tina – couldn’t have gone to Venice to die.

  Death in Munich. Exactly the same number of syllables.

  ‘You writer?’ he asks. (I don’t really know why I imagine his name should be Tin – a male Tina.)

  I shake my head. ‘Nein, nein, nein.’ My only German must come to some use.

  ‘Editor.’ With food in my mouth, it probably sounds like ‘waiter’.

  He’s surprised. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘From?’

  ‘From India.’

  ‘Apfelstrudel on the house,’ he says.

  I’m surprised. I don’t know what to do or say. Anxious – as if I’m about to miss my appointment with death yet again – I put my hand inside the bag and take out the strip of Alzolam.

  ‘Sick?’ he asks, sniffing to ask whether I have a cold.

  I push the first tablet out of its circular home and wait.

  I want to tell him that what I have is incurable – life is my disease, I want to be rid of it.

  I push out a few more of the pills. It is the opposite of bursting bubble wraps. I feel happy – I feel closer to the destination, as if I’m getting my ticket punched.

  But the apfelstrudel is here. Apple and cinnamon, in a lake of vanilla-scented custard. Outside, there’s a building – that one, on the right, just behind the fish house, where the people from The Sound of Music disappeared – that resembles this dessert in front of me.

  It is dark now, when we begin to miss the sweetness of light.

  I cut a tiny piece of the apple and pastry and wrap it in a coating of custard. I lick my lips – I want everything inside me. It tastes like something that will stain anything it touches, a stain more permanent than light, a permanent stain, like life. When I look out of the window, it feels like the top of the house is gone. Have I been eating it? I feel something in my throat. I cough. Is it the window of the house, or the edge of the conical roof that’s stuck in my throat? I want water, but the waiter’s disappeared. I wave at the little boy to catch his attention. But he is playing with the salt and pepper pots. Links. Rechts. Links. Rechts. I put a few more spoons of the custard to push the window down my throat. It’s still hot. It helps to push slightly, but it’s a poor lubricant. The coughing stops temporarily. I wait for water and the waiter. I put a bite of the apfelstrudel into my mouth again. Its taste is irresistible, like death. The coughing starts again – there are doorknobs and tables and chairs and pots and pans from the house inside my throat. The sticky custard has glued them there, as if this was their home. I don’t know what to do. Should I vomit and return them to their owner, to where they should be? There’s a lamp – a bulb – that’s burning my throat now. Where’s the waiter? I need water.

  There’s no water.

  There, there’s water, two tables away. The man in a white shirt is looking at his phone. I run to his table and empty his glass of water into my throat.

  I don’t explain anything to him.

  I am walking home. Am I walking home?

  Am I still alive?

  I am certain that I’ll die someday. But today’s perhaps not that day.

  I’m swallowing doors and windows, even the sky, I’m eating people and traffic lights. I think I’m still alive today.

  ‘I’m Not Sure’

  ‘Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can’t process it because it doesn’t fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.’

  —Jessica Stern

  ‘I’M NOT SURE.’

  I pretend that it’s fine that she doesn’t know, but it’s not the first time she’s used that phrase. I let it go.

  The cold wind scratches my face, my hair is like sharp thread on my skin, my fingers behave like insects in my pocket, but none of this matters to Paulina. She’s intoxicated by herself – every visit by a foreigner energises her patriotism, she discovers something new about Wurzburg and consoles and convinces herself that she was right in having chosen this tiny town over metropolitan places. I’m
the foreigner this season, her catch as it were.

  ‘Do you like flowers or trees?’ she asks.

  It’s not her English that disturbs me as much as this distinction. Isn’t it like asking whether I like someone’s fingers or her entire body? ‘I don’t care for the glamour of flowers,’ I say, pausing to check whether I actually mean it.

  She stops walking and turns to look at me. I might be wrong, but I imagine her slightly angry, as if I’ve said something offensive about the shape of her nose.

  I clarify. ‘I don’t like flowers in vases or bouquets, I mean. Nothing is more glamorous than life. The living are glamorous. There’s no glamour in death...’

  ‘If you come here in the summer’– she tells me in the tone of someone saying ‘If you were to go to the moon...’ – ‘You’ll be drowned in the smell of roses from this garden below.’

  ‘Roses? When did roses first come to Wurzburg, you think?’

  ‘I’m not sure...’

  There, again. To make her feel at ease with her ignorance, I take a photo that I know I’ll delete as soon as I’m back in my hotel.

  ‘Look at the river below. That’s the Main. It froze last winter, you know. It started in that direction. Ich neissnicht. I mean, I’m not sure – was it this? Or that? I can never quite figure out which way is upstream. That must be downstream?’

  I’m not interested.

  ‘Isn’t this a majestic view of the town? You can see the entire city from here. Even the vineyards. Look at that hill over there. That is called the North and that the...’

  Before she can complete her sentence, her right hand lands on my ears, the pointing finger almost into my eardrum.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she apologises, laughing.

  I don’t laugh. ‘Where do you live, Paulina?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, that’s easy. Imagine my nose as 12 o’clock. Look at where my finger is pointing. Around that 2 o’clock – see where I’m pointing, look – is where my flat is. You see that red building with a greyish roof? Just behind that. Well, I’m not sure you can see it from here. You’ll have to imagine it...’